An FED is fabricated by vacuum-packaging a cathode plate having a field emitter array and an anode plate having a phosphor in parallel with each other at a narrow interval (within 2 mm) The FED is a device colliding electrons emitted from the field emitters of the cathode plate with the phosphor of the anode plate and displaying an image using the cathodoluminescence of the phosphor. Recently, FEDs are widely being researched and developed as a flat panel display capable of substituting for conventional cathode ray tubes (CRTs).
The field emitter that is a core component of a FED cathode plate shows significantly different efficiency according to a device structure, an emitter material and an emitter shape. The structures of current field emission devices can be roughly classified into a diode type composed of a cathode and an anode and a triode type composed of a cathode, a gate and an anode. In the triode-type FED, the cathode or a field emitter performs a function of emitting electrons, the gate serves as an electrode inducing electron emission, and the anode performs the function of receiving the emitted electrons. In the triode structure, electrons are easily emitted by an electric field applied between the cathode and the gate. Thus, the triode-type field emission device can operate at a lower voltage than the diode-type field emission device and easily control electron emission. Consequently, triode-type FEDs are widely being developed.
A field emitter material includes metal, silicon, diamond, diamond like carbon, carbon nanotube, carbon nanofiber, and so on. Carbon nanotube and carbon fiber are fine and sharp and thus are recently and frequently used as the emitter material.
FIG. 1 is a cross-sectional view showing a carbon field emitter made of carbon nanotube, carbon nanofiber, etc and the constitution of an active-matrix FED pixel using the same. FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram illustrating a driving method of the active-matrix FED shown in FIG. 1 according to conventional art.
The illustrated active-matrix FED includes a cathode plate and an anode plate vacuum-packaged to face each other in parallel. Here, the cathode plate comprises a glass substrate 100, a thin film transistor (TFT) 110 formed on a part of the glass substrate 100, a carbon field emitter 120 formed on a part of a drain electrode of the TFT 110, a gate hole 130 and a gate insulating layer 140 surrounding the carbon field emitter 120, and a field emitter gate 150 formed on a part of the gate insulating layer 140. The anode plate comprises a glass substrate 160, a transparent electrode 170 formed on a part of the glass substrate 160, and a red, green or blue phosphor 180 formed on a part of the transparent electrode 170.
In FIG. 1, the TFT 110 comprises a transistor gate 111 formed on the cathode glass substrate 100, a transistor gate insulating layer 112 covering the transistor gate 111 and the cathode glass substrate 100, a TFT active layer 113 formed on the transistor gate insulating layer 112 on the transistor gate 111, a source 114 and a drain 115 of the TFT formed on both ends of the active layer 113, a source electrode 116 of the TFT formed on the source 114 and a part of the gate insulating layer 112, and a drain electrode 117 of the TFT formed on the drain 115 and a part of the gate insulating layer 112.
As illustrated in FIG. 2, the cathode plate of the FED shown in FIG. 1 has the carbon field emitter 120 connected with the TFT through the drain electrode 117 of the TFT in each pixel defined by row signal lines R1, R2, R3, . . . and column signal lines C1, C2, C3, . . . . The gate 111 of the TFT is connected to each row signal line R1, R2, R3, . . . , and the source electrode 116 of the TFT is connected to each column signal line C1, C2, C3, . . . . A scan signal and a data signal of the display are transferred to the TFT gate 111 and the source electrode 116 through the row signal lines and the column signal lines, respectively. Here, the scan signal and data signal of the display are applied as pulse voltage signals, and the gray scale of the display is obtained by modulating the width or amplitude of a data pulse signal.
When the FED of FIGS. 1 and 2 operates, a constant direct current (DC) voltage is applied to the field emitter gate 150 so as to induce the field emitter 120 to emit electrons, and a high DC voltage is applied to the transparent electrode 170 so as to accelerate the electrons emitted from the field emitter 120 to high energy. When one row is selected by a high level voltage H of the scan signal, the TFT is turned on while the data signal has a low level voltage L. Consequently, luminescence occurs while the data signal has the low level voltage L.
Since the TFT is turned on/off by the scan signal applied to the TFT gate 111 and the data signal applied to the source electrode 116 of the TFT, the conventional active-matrix FED of FIG. 2 can operate at low addressing voltage regardless of the voltage applied to the field emitter gate 150 but has a drawback described below.
When the active-matrix FED operates based on the voltage signals as illustrated in FIG. 2, the performance of the display totally depends on the characteristics of the TFT 110 in each pixel. In particular, when voltage required for field emission becomes considerably high, a high voltage is also induced to the drain of the TFT and then the source-drain leakage current of the TFT 110 is high or itself. Thus, the amount of the source-drain leakage current may be considerably large, which results in severe deterioration in contrast ratio and uniformity of the display.